Inevitably nicknamed the iWatch, the Apple device, on which the company is characteristically not commenting, has the tech world in a frenzy of sci-fi speculation. James Bond, Dick Tracy, Inspector Gadget – the techno watch has been a mainstay of fanboy fiction for generations. But the internet revolution seems to have largely bypassed the watch, until now.

Apple reportedly has 100 employees looking at the device that will take advantage of recent developments in hi-tech curved glass, cheaper sensors and better voice recognition software.

What will the iWatch do? Monitor your health? Act as a credit card? A wrist-bound GPS? Laser cannon and teleporter? We'll have to wait and see but to be honest if that's all it does, you may as well strap an iPhone to your arm. Apple has a history of delivering surprises and the iWatch would be its first big new product since the death of founder Steve Jobs. The company will want to make a splash. Especially as arch-rival Google has its own "smart watch" in development and is already testing Google Glass, web-connected specs. Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook too are watching developments and have their own plans.

Last year analyst Forrester issued a report describing wearable computing as "the new platform war". Tech analyst Juniper Research estimates that wearable computing will generate $800m (£500m) in revenue this year and $1.5bn in 2014. Annual unit sales of wearable computers will rise from 15m this year to 70m by 2017.

Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

‘When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.’ — Margaret Hamilton

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

This Wired feature from 2015 tells a must read story for any tech or space fan, and reminds us that

1/ Tech History is key to apprehend Tech

2/ There have been women in tech and engineering, some of them being defining characters : Margaret Hamilton is one of them, along with Ada Lovelace and so many others who deserve a much better recognition.

A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it's relying on Google's public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services.

The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google's cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business.

Some media outlets reported on Google's iCloud win in 2016, but Apple never provided confirmation.

Apple periodically publishes new versions of a PDF called the iOS Security Guide. For years the document contained language indicating that iCloud services were relying on remote data storage systems from Amazon Web Services, as well as Microsoft's Azure.

But in the latest version, the Microsoft Azure reference is gone, and in its place is Google Cloud Platform. Before the January update, Apple most recently updated the iOS Security Guide in March.

The latest update doesn't indicate whether Apple is using any Google cloud services other than core storage of "objects" like photos and videos. The document also doesn't make it clear when Apple started storing data in Google's cloud. Microsoft declined to comment. Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Looks like there are no places left where Google is not, while remembering that the cloud means "my files on someone else's computer"...

With sounds from Bach and Chuck Berry to humpback whales and a baby crying, an album used by NASA in the 1970s is set to be publicly released.

The phonograph album — known as "Voyager Golden Record" — originally was launched into space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977. NASA officials at the time hoped the record would be picked up by alien life.

The original album likely still is floating in space as it was made from copper and coated in gold to protect it from space conditions.

The soundtrack is available on SoundCloud, and a CD was released in the early 1990s. Through a Kickstarter campaign, record label Ozma Records gave album copies to those who helped to reach the $1.4 million goal. The album is expected to be released in January.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Of music, space and stars... when NASA launched Golden Records instead of being awarded them :-)

This year, for the first time, we conducted an industry-wide survey to establish a comprehensive view of the state of data science and machine learning. We received over 16,000 responses and learned a ton about who is working with data, what’s happening at the cutting edge of machine learning across industries, and how new data scientists can best break into the field. The below report shares some of our key findings and includes interactive visualizations so you can easily cut the data to find out exactly what you want to know. Here are some sample takeaways:

While Python may be the most commonly used tool overall, more Statisticians report using R.

On average, data scientists are around 30 years old, but this value varies between countries. For instance, the average respondent from India was about 9 years younger than the average respondent from Australia.

The highest percentage of our respondents obtained a Master’s degree, but those in the highest salary ranges ($150K+) are slightly more likely to have a doctoral degree.

"The world is beating. Your heart is beating every X seconds, a flower takes Y days to flourish. If a tiger is running at you, your heart beats faster, if the flower receives more sun, it flourishes faster.

Computers so far have been like calculators. You would enter the commands, and get the result. Some fundamental commands got installed in every computer so that humans could enter higher level commands that would then execute lower level commands and produce astonishing outputs with little input.

What has been lacking however, is a synchronization between the computer's beating and the human's beating.

Of course, there is some synchronization already happening, using if trees and sometimes machine learning. But the synchronization is still so superficial that today's computers are basically blind, they force you to get out of your way to enter commands, they aren't aware of what is truly happening.

The future of computers is when they actually understand you, when they understand what humanity cares about.

This is why I started Power. We put chips inside bricks.

Because bricks are everywhere, bricks are where people spend most of their life. If we can turn on the bricks, we can turn on the people, and we can create the infrastructure required for the next wave of technological revolution to happen. With a new mesh of human-machine interactions and brick-to-brick (building-to-building) communication, we can create the future of Internet, decentralized and benefiting from a core understanding of human experience."

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Louison Dumont is back from his blockchain and AI ventures, and it seems he dropped the (his) chains to keep and combine Blocks and AI. Intriguing.

Delphi Automotive said it plans to acquire Boston-based autonomous vehicle software supplier NuTonomy in a deal that could be valued at $450 million.The acquisition, which is expected to close before the end of this year, will nearly double Delphi's 100-plus automated driving team with NuTonomy's 100 employees, including 70 engineers and scientists, the company said in a news release.NuTonomy will continue to operate in Boston, alongside Delphi's team in Boston, as well as in Delphi offices in Singapore; Pittsburgh; Santa Monica, Calif.; and in Silicon Valley in California.Glen De Vos, chief technology officer for Delphi, said the acquisition of NuTonomy allows Delphi access to the commercial truck market."We think this is the tip of the spear for automated driving," De Vos said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "This dramatically accelerates our penetration in this marketplace."

Many US Roads Need To Be Drastically Improved In Order For Self-Driving Cars To Have The Widespread Impact That Many Are Currently Predicting, Argues 3M Global Government Affairs Manager Dan Veoni In A Recent Op-Ed In The Hill.States And Localities Aren’t Making The Investments To Solve This Problem, And The Federal Government Isn’t Stepping In.Public-Private Partnerships Could Provide The Necessary Funding, But They Won’t Spring Up Overnight.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

It will all be about the dialog between vehicles and the infrastructure which supports them

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft may be adding more cars on the road, according to a new study published by the U.C. Davis Institute of Transportation Studies this week. Though the study found that 9% of car owners said they've disposed or one or more of them because of ride-hailing, it's unclear whether it's reduced their total vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

Ride-hailing users who also use public transit have higher personal ownership rates than those who only use public transit.

Ride-hailing has led to a net 6% reduction in public transit use by Americans in major cities (draws people away from buses and light rail, but complements commuter rails).

A majority (49% to 61%) of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all, or by walking, biking, or public transit, likely adding to the total VMT.

“Typically the main problem with software coding .../... is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Software may be eating the world yet nobody understands how...

“When your tires are flat, you look at your tires, they are flat. When your software is broken, you look at your software, you see nothing.”

Google's Quantum AI Lab has shown off a new 72-qubit quantum processor called 'Bristlecone', which it says could soon achieve 'quantum supremacy' by outperforming a classical supercomputer on some problems.

Quantum supremacy is a key milestone on the journey towards quantum computing. The idea is that if a quantum processor can be operated with low enough error rates, it could outperform a classical supercomputer on a well-defined computer science problem.

Quantum computers are an area of huge interest because, if they can be built at a large enough scale, they could rapidly solve problems that cannot be handled by traditional computers. That's why the biggest names in tech are racing ahead with quantum computing projects: in January Intel announced its own 49-qubit quantum chip, for example.

"We believe the experimental demonstration of a quantum processor outperforming a supercomputer would be a watershed moment for our field, and remains one of our key objectives," Kelly said -- although he did not offer a timescale for this achievement.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Quantum Computing is happening. Google claims 72-qubit processor, while Europe has a 10 years / €1Bn plan that recently delivered ... a 150 pages roadmap. Not sure which one is the most desirable.

In May and June 2013, when New Orleans’ murder rate was the sixth-highest in the United States, the Orleans Parish district attorney handed down two landmark racketeering indictments against dozens of men accused of membership in two violent Central City drug trafficking gangs, 3NG and the 110ers. Members of both gangs stood accused of committing 25 murders as well as several attempted killings and armed robberies.

Subsequent investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and local agencies produced further RICO indictments, including that of a 22-year-old man named Evans “Easy” Lewis, a member of a gang called the 39ers who was accused of participating in a drug distribution ring and several murders.

According to Ronal Serpas, the department’s chief at the time, one of the tools used by the New Orleans Police Department to identify members of gangs like 3NG and the 39ers came from the Silicon Valley company Palantir. The company provided software to a secretive NOPD program that traced people’s ties to other gang members, outlined criminal histories, analyzed social media, and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become a victim. As part of the discovery process in Lewis’ trial, the government turned over more than 60,000 pages of documents detailing evidence gathered against him from confidential informants, ballistics, and other sources — but they made no mention of the NOPD’s partnership with Palantir, according to a source familiar with the 39ers trial.

The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge,the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago that purports to predict which people are likely drivers or victims of violence.

The partnership has been extendedthreetimes, with the third extension scheduled to expire on February 21st, 2018. The city of New Orleans and Palantir have not responded to questions about the program’s current status.

Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Minority Report : Palantir deployed a predictive policing system in New Orleans that even city council members don’t know about. How much of the "findings" gp back to the Mothership ?

What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. It was secretly founded in 2014 by Jonathan Yaney, who built solar-powered drone startup Titan Aerospace and sold it to Google. Now TechCrunch has learned from three sources that SpinLaunch is raising a massive $30 million Series A to develop its catapult technology. And we’ve scored an interview with the founder after four years in stealth.

Sources who’ve spoken to the SpinLaunch team tell me the idea is to create a much cheaper and sustainable way to get things like satellites from earth into space without chemical propellant. Using a catapult would sidestep the heavy fuel and expensive booster rockets used by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

SpinLaunch plans to use a centrifuge spinning at an incredible rate. All that momentum is then harnessed to catapult a payload into space at speeds one source said could be around 3,000 miles per hour. With enough momentum, objects could be flung into space on their own. Alternatively, the catapult could provide some of the power needed with cargo being equipped with supplemental rockets necessary to leave earth’s atmosphere.

After some hesitation about emerging from stealth, Yaney agreed to talk to TechCrunch about his secretive startup, and show us the render of SpinLaunch’s future launch site hangar seen above. “Since the dawn of space exploration, rockets have been the only way to access space. Yet in 70 years, the technology has only made small incremental advances,” Yaney tells me. “To truly commercialize and industrialize space, we need 10x tech improvement.”

Until recently, few details about SpinLaunch have been available. SpinLaunch’s website is password-protected, and some Sunnyvale, Calif. job listings merely refer to it as a “rapidly growing space launch startup.” But last month, a bill was proposed in the Hawaii state senate to issue $25 million in bonds to assist SpinLaunch with “constructing a portion of its electrical small satellite launch system.” Hawaii hopes to gain construction contracts and jobs, and meet government goals for expanding space accessibility, by helping SpinLaunch.

SEC documents show that Yaney raised $1 million in equity in 2014, the year SpinLaunch was founded, $2.9 million in equity in 2015, $2.2 million in debt in mid-2017 and another $2 million in debt in late 2017. Now Yaney confirms SpinLaunch has raised a total of $10 million to date, and that he’s personally an investor. As for the next $30 million, he says “The current status of our Series A raise is that we are still taking meetings with potential investors and have not yet received an executed offer.”

Yaney has been co-founding startups since 2000, including TriVance and Moretti Designs. But a passion for aeronautics led him to become a 1,000+ hour pilot, and start communications and imaging solar drone startup Titan Aerospace. It sold to Google in 2014 after receiving acquisition interest from Facebook, and Yaney began work on SpinLaunch to huck satellites into orbit.

Yaney explains that reaching orbital velocities typically “requires a rocket to carry massive quantities of propellant, leaving only a small fraction (a few percent) of the overall vehicle’s mass for ‘cargo.’ ” But SpinLaunch replaces rocket boosters with a kinetic launch system using principles “similar to those explored by several ground-based mass accelerators that date back to the 1960s. Modern adaptations include electromagnetic rail and coil guns, electrothermal-chemical guns, light gas guns, ram accelerators and blast wave accelerators.”

NASA has investigated the possibility of catapult-assisted launches that fire off a track instead of a centrifuge, but none have become cost-effective enough to successfully be used to commercially launch things into space.

Yaney’s method is different. He says “SpinLaunch employs a rotational acceleration method, harnessing angular momentum to gradually accelerate the vehicle to hypersonic speeds. This approach employs a dramatically lower cost architecture with much lower power.” SpinLaunch is targeting a per launch price of less than $500,000, while Yaney says “all existing rocket-based companies cost between $5 million and $100 million per launch.”

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Looks like #NewSpace is getting very creative these days even if 10x improvements are always welcome...

On January 20-22 2018, around 1000 innovators converged to the City of Munich for the 14th time to mingle and listen to an impressive lineup of speakers : entrepreneurs, scientists, media experts, politicians and artists.

This year's theme was "reconquer" : here are my highlights.The most impressive talks in my personal view were Lilium, AI & Robotics, with a specific mention to Scott Galloway's now famous yearly slideshow.

While you wait for the complete set of videos that will show up on DLD YouTube channel , please enjoy these short videos and slide shots assembled on a famous German band's song.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

On January 20-22 2018, around 1000 innovators converged to the City of Munich for the 14th time to mingle and listen to an impressive lineup of speakers : entrepreneurs, scientists, media experts, politicians and artists.

Here are the highlights : beyond Scott Galloways now famous slideshow on Tech - 2017 rewind, a call for breaking up the four horsemen, and 2018 predictions - was an impressive talk about the future of air mobility featuring Lilium, as well as a demo of what happens when AI meets robotics.

NASA put its obstacle avoidance and vision-based research to the test, by racing an A.I.-In October, NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory pitted a drone controlled by artificial intelligence against a professional human drone pilot named Ken Loo. According to NASA's press release, it had been researching autonomous drone technology for the past two years at that point, funded by Google and its interest in JPL’s vision-based navigation work. The race consisted of a time-trial where the lap times and behaviors of both the A.I.-operated drone and the manually-piloted drone were analyzed and compared. Let’s take a look at the results.NASA said in its release that the company developed three drones; Batman, Joker, and Nightwing. Researchers focused mostly on the intricate algorithms required to navigate efficiently through a race like this, namely obstacle avoidance and maximum speed through narrow environments. These algorithms were then combined with Google’s Tango technology, which JPL had a significant hand in as well. Task Manager of the JPL project, Rob Reid said, “We pitted our algorithms against a human, who flies a lot more by feel. You can actually see that the A.I. flies the drone smoothly around the course, whereas human pilots tend to accelerate aggressively, so their path is jerkier.” As it turned out, Loo’s speeds were much higher, and he was able to perform impressive aerial maneuvers to his benefit, but the A.I.-infused drones were more consistent, and never gave in to fatigue. “This is definitely the densest track I’ve ever flown,” said Loo. “One of my faults as a pilot is I get tired easily. When I get mentally fatigued, I start to get lost, even if I’ve flown the course 10 times.”Loo averaged 11.1 seconds per lap, while the autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles average 13.9 seconds. In other words, while Loo managed to reach higher speeds overall, the drones operating autonomously were more consistent, essentially flying a very similar lap and route each time. “Our autonomous drones can fly much faster,” said Reid. “One day you might see them racing professionally!” infused drone against a human opponent.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Race against the machine : human pilot still beats NASA’s AI by 20% when it comes to fly a drone

I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You don’t have to read it, and are advised to take caution exploring further.

As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. It gave me access to a lot of things which were totally inappropriate for a young teenager, but it was OK. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally. I have always been a critical proponent of the internet and everything it has brought, and broadly considered it to be emancipatory and beneficial. I state this at the outset because thinking through the implications of the problem I am going to describe troubles my own assumptions and prejudices in significant ways.

One of so-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of attitudes which happens with age, and at some point this question might be a lot less hypothetical. I don’t want to be a hypocrite about it. I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief broadens into attitudes about the role of the internet in public life as whole.

I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. I see kids engrossed in screens all the time, in pushchairs and in restaurants, and there’s always a bit of a Luddite twinge there, but I am not a parent, and I’m not making parental judgments for or on anyone else. I’ve seen family members and friend’s children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK.

But I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down.

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

To begin: Kid’s YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I’ve been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That’s it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Of machine generated content, video, children and complacency : a must read before leaving your kids alone with an iPad...

We’ve developed an approach to generate 3D adversarial objects that reliably fool neural networks in the real world, no matter how the objects are looked at.

Neural network based classifiers reach near-human performance in many tasks, and they’re used in high risk, real world systems. Yet, these same neural networks are particularly vulnerable to adversarial examples, carefully perturbed inputs that cause targeted misclassificatio

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

The spirit of Magritte hides in neural networks : this team has been printing 3D objects that consistently fool machine vision object classifiers. A turtle becomes a rifle, while a cat is consistently recognized as guacamole.

Regina Dugan is leaving her position as the head of Facebook's fledgling consumer-hardware lab, Building 8, raising questions about the company's plans for ambitious initiatives like brain-reading technology and augmented-reality glasses.

Dugan said in a Facebook post on Tuesday that she was leaving to "focus on building and leading a new endeavor," though she didn't specify further.

Dugan joined Facebook 18 months ago from Google's advanced-projects division, which she famously described as a "band of pirates trying to do epic sh--." The move was celebrated at the time as a major coup for Facebook and a sign that the social network was getting serious about building hardware that would compete with Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Building 8 has yet to release a product, but the division is working on an unannounced video-chat device for the home code-named "Aloha" and expected to be released in May, Business Insider previously reported.

A Facebook spokesperson told BI that Bosworth would continue to lead Oculus and Building 8 but declined to say whether the company would seek a replacement for Dugan.

Dugan's time at the helm of Building 8 has not been smooth.

The group has seen several key departures in its short history, including its COO, Richard Wooldridge, its head of consumer experience, Donald Hicks, and its head of product management, Olivier Bartholot, according to people familiar with the matter.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Hardware is never soft nor easy , even when you have enormous ambitions and firepower #HardwareIsNotDead

Hyperloop One just struck a major deal with Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

Virgin Group announced Thursday that it has invested in Hyperloop One, a startup that's working on constructing the high-speed transit system Elon Musk first outlined in a white paper in 2013. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but the investment was significant enough that Hyperloop One will now be called Virgin Hyperloop.

"After visiting Hyperloop One’s test site in Nevada and meeting its leadership team this past summer, I am convinced this groundbreaking technology will change transportation as we know it and dramatically cut journey times," Virgin Group founder Richard Branson said in a press release.

SiFive has taped out and started licensing its U54-MC Coreplex, its first RISC-V IP designed to run Linux. The design lags the performance of a comparable ARM Cortex-A53 but shows progress creating a commercial market for the open-source instruction set architecture.

A single 64-bit U54 core delivers 1.7 DMIPS/MHz or 2.75 CoreMark/MHz at 1.5 GHz. It measures 0.234 mm2 including its integrated 32+32KB L1 cache in a TSMC 28HPC process using a 12-track library.

A quad-core complex with a 2-MByte shared coherent L2 cache, Gbit Ethernet and DDR3/4 controllers and other peripherals measures ~30 mm2. SiFive will deliver a quad-core chip that includes an E51 management core that will ship in the first quarter on boards targeting software developers.

The single-issue, in-order U54 is expected to lag the performance of ARM’s dual-issue A53. By comparison, in late 2014 Freescale (now NXP) announced the QorIQ LS1043A, a midrange quad-core A53 running at 1.5 GHz delivering more than 16,000 CoreMarks at 6 W.

SiFive believes its part will be competitive in power and area efficiency. It also aims to innovate in its business model.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft want more control over the internet’s basic infrastructure

ON SEPTEMBER 21st Microsoft and Facebook announced the completion of a 6,600km (4,100-mile) cable stretching from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. Dubbed Marea, Spanish for “tide”, the bundle of eight fibre-optic threads, roughly the size of a garden hose, is the highest-capacity connection across the Atlantic Ocean. It is capable of transferring 160 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of more than 5,000 high-resolution movies.

Such ultra-fast fibre networks are needed to keep up with the torrent of data flowing around the world. In 2016 international bandwidth usage reached 3,544 terabits per second, roughly double the figure in 2014. Firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft used to lease all of their international bandwidth from carriers such as BT or AT&T. Now they need so much network capacity to synchronise data across their networks of data centres around the world that it makes more sense to lay their own dedicated pipes.

This has led to a boom in new undersea cable systems. The Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, reckons that 100,000km of submarine cable was laid in 2016, up from just 16,000km in 2015. TeleGeography, a market-research firm, predicts that $9.2bn will be spent on such cable projects between 2016 and 2018, five times as much as in the previous three years.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

After DataCenter infrastructure (through OCP open-source hardware), Tech companies drill down further the value chain and hit sea bottom with fiber. Software is indeed eating the world yet leads to hardware...

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